Moderator

That is one of the spookiest things i've ever seen! On one hand it looks perfectly real, just like a photo, but there's just something about it that gives it away as CG. The only thing I can think of is the actual lack of "life", not expression as the face has that, but just that something that you can't really put your finger on.

EDIT: I've just been looking at some of the other CG pics on CGTalk and there's some very impressive stuff!!

It probably won't be that long before replays in driving sims look like this !

Well-known Member

Its all to do with texturing and lighting. You don't need particularly complex modelling and animation with certain methods of lighting. However a lot of these techniques whilst fine for still and even moving images have a couple of fundamental issues which make them unsuitable for realtime gaming engines.

Firstly one main technique to get this level of realism is to capture real photographic survey information of actual real world scene to give you the lighting and reflectance characteristics in the scene. (the citreon robot advert is an example of this).

But you are somewhat locked into the reference lighting model...deviate from it too much (ie add arbitrary objects with texture and radiosity characteristics not existent or divergent in the reference scene and the results become much less seemless. So the practical worth of this type of lighting technique in a given job is not so earth-shaking.

Moderator

I doubt we will have in game graphics of this level for a long, long time.

Can you imagine how much power would be required to make this immage move? in an interactive environment?

I somehow doubt this next batch of consoles will manage it.

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If someone told me 10 years ago (back in the days of simple unmapped polygon shapes) that we'd have graphics of the quality seen in games like Half Life 2, Doom 3, Far Cry etc then i'd have doubted it. The development of in game CG has been astonishing over the last 5-10 years and if the new batches of consoles are as powerful as they are being made out to be then we should see a huge leap forward this time. There seems a much bigger technological move forward this time than when we moved from N64 to DC/PS2. You would also think that M$ & Sony will have designed machines that can achieve their full potential and not suffer from the bottlenecks that marred the PS2's emotion engine (as we all know the 66 million polygons per sec was reduced significantly to around 10 million due to a video memory bottleneck).

I personally am optimistic about the leap that we will see in graphical performance of the next gen consoles and whilst achieving the quality of the above render is being a little far fetched, I do think that we will be astounded by the results.

Banned

u would need sooo much power to have that rendererd in real time. that still image might of took 10 minutes. If you wanted a game to look like that u would have to render it multiple times every second. but the power of computers in 10 years would be hundreds of times more powerfull then todays.

Moderator

u would need sooo much power to have that rendererd in real time. that still image might of took 10 minutes. If you wanted a game to look like that u would have to render it multiple times every second. but the power of computers in 10 years would be hundreds of times more powerfull then todays.

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Agreed - i'd say we are probably about 5-10 years off having in game graphics of that quality. I think that we will see a huge leap in quality with the next gen consoles though. I guess in game graphics will reach a level with the next gen consoles that they will really start bluring the difference between CG & reality. You can get away with in game images that look very real without them having the complexity of the above image (where 1 frame can be studied in detail).

Member

one thing that im happy with the new consoles will be full screen AA with no frame drops ( apprently ) i to agree that teh next gen will be a massive massive leap. wonder how more powerfull the chipset is over the ATi R520 core (think thats it)

Well-known Member

Most of them (the big games anyway) already take far longer than films to produce, building a new engine takes a long time! I imagine quite a few games already have the same development cost budget as an average film.

I think the average cost of a decent size game is now $4-10 million to produce according to some sources on the web.

You know like nunchuck skills, bowhunting skills, computer hacking skills... Girls only want boyfriends who have great skills. ....

Well-known Member

I'm all for better graphics but the nearer we get to real life the less fantastical a game might become imo. Yes your getting a better level of detail and with that a more emersive experience but I play computer games for escapism and the nearer to reality we seem to get the less I feel I'm aceiving that.
I think it's good to strive towards bigger and better things but where do you draw the line. With hardware costs increasing along with game development costs and leadtimes who's going to be able to afford to buy or make these games.
Everyone was happy playing games 5-10 years ago with the level of grahics detail they had then and the technology available because games were more substance over graphics/style.
Yes it will be awsome being able to play in such environments as long as the enjoyment and balanced gameplay is also within the game.

Guest

I'm all for better graphics but the nearer we get to real life the less fantastical a game might become imo. Yes your getting a better level of detail and with that a more emersive experience but I play computer games for escapism and the nearer to reality we seem to get the less I feel I'm aceiving that.
I think it's good to strive towards bigger and better things but where do you draw the line. With hardware costs increasing along with game development costs and leadtimes who's going to be able to afford to buy or make these games.
Everyone was happy playing games 5-10 years ago with the level of grahics detail they had then and the technology available because games were more substance over graphics/style.
Yes it will be awsome being able to play in such environments as long as the enjoyment and balanced gameplay is also within the game.

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As games get more complex, take more time and cost more you will get one of 2 releases on consoles/PC

1: Games which have taken years to make had the money available and are stunning and a must buy
2: Games which are rushed, not enough time or money spent and are total crap

And you can bet there will be more of 2 than there will be of 1, which is bad news for us.

I know this is what happens now but it will get worse and worse as things progress and get more complicated.

Well-known Member

Yeah it is a bit of a shame that the most original games only seem to come out on the handhelds these days. Realism is fine, but games are not supposed to be real or we would all be playing MS Flight Simulator.

You know like nunchuck skills, bowhunting skills, computer hacking skills... Girls only want boyfriends who have great skills. ....

Distinguished Member

Running someone over in San Andreas is great fun. But is it going to be the same with truly realistic people? And how realistic are the effects going to be? Just a crunch and a smear of red, or are we going to see really quite graphic effects?

I can see that many games will want to adopt a stylised version of reality to avoid problems like this.

Whatever can be asserted without evidence, can also be dismissed without evidence

Active Member

I don't think future processing power (or lack thereof) is the issue with this sort of graphical quality - its a TIME issue. Rendering graphics this detailed & realistic will probably always take a huge amount of time. Something that most game developers have little of!

Even nowadays I've heard some developers speak of purposely reducing the graphical quality of game environments/characters in order to save time. Animal Crossing is a perfect example of this. I read that the designer gave the game a cartoony look because rendering everything to look as realistic as possible would have taken too much (precious) time.

I personally would prefer it if developers (listen carefully EA!) spent more time playtesting and making a game enjoyable/playable, than adding fancy special effects or graphical detail. Burnout 3 immediately springs to mind here (beautiful to look at, but the game itself wasn't much cop now, was it?).

Well-known Member

(beautiful to look at, but the game itself wasn't much cop now, was it?

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I thought the gameplay was excellent! Now if you were talking about the NFS series then I would agree with you

In terms of realism there are definate questions over the content of games, especially if you can combine these images with virtual reality. Although, mostly in the domain of sci-fi books, could you really have ultra violent games in an almost or hyper real situation? I think it would be difficult for the brain to dissassociate between the game and reality.

You know like nunchuck skills, bowhunting skills, computer hacking skills... Girls only want boyfriends who have great skills. ....

Moderator

I thought the gameplay was excellent! Now if you were talking about the NFS series then I would agree with you

In terms of realism there are definate questions over the content of games, especially if you can combine these images with virtual reality. Although, mostly in the domain of sci-fi books, could you really have ultra violent games in an almost or hyper real situation? I think it would be difficult for the brain to dissassociate between the game and reality.

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I agree Sinzer. Up until now there has always been that barrier where it is pretty obvious that you are playing a game. When graphics reach a level comparable to the posted image then the brain could easily be fooled into thinking that the experience is real. There are a few examples around today that show how easily the brain is fooled. One is the Hex at Alton Towers where although you are only ever slightly tilting on the "ride" you feel like you have actually spun upside down and at one stage I was holding on for grim life even though I was virtually on the level. The other is the 360 cinema's such as the famous rollercoaster one. Again these fool the brain fairly well so that you get a sense of really being on the rollercoaster. Imagine a virtual reality MMORPG with life like graphics!